For a man born in the countryside who emigrated to a city looking for a job in a factory, living in an industrial city was a miserable experience: narrow, filthy and bed-smelling streets, dingy-faced children on the streets wearing the same old, shabby clothes day in and day out, beggars here and there and a whole sense of despair in the foggy and contaminated air. Compared to living in the old farm, living in the city was the next-best thing to living in Hell. In the farm, one would work from sunrise to sunset, six days a week as Sunday was reserved for Church. The family was not rich, but food would never miss on the table. Here in the city, a man works up to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week (not even time for the Lord) and the family barely makes ends meet, and many nights we have to skip supper before bedtime.
Living in the farm was a guarantee of poverty while moving to the big city offered, at least, a slight chance of making a small fortune and leave poverty behind. However, only a very few managed to escape the deplorable conditions of the newly-born working class and get clerical jobs, better-paid with better conditions. For the vast majority of peasants and farmers emigrating to the cities and getting hired in factories, life was an endless misery.
